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About Joseph Wurtenbaugh

'Joseph Wurtenbaugh' is the writing name of Frank Dudley Berry, Jr. Mr. Berry is a retired criminal law professional and entrepreneurial lawyer.

Mr. Berry's first novel was 'Thursday's Child', an epic love story that infused a conventional romance formula with a rich novel of ideas. The result is one of the most unusual stories that the casual reader is ever likely to encounter - a narrative that manages to construct a modern epic and a heroic love story out of the most mundane materials of everyday life.

His second novel, 'A Prophet Without Honor', is a tightly controlled excursion into the realm of contrafactual history. Written in epistolary form and voiced in a completely different manner that 'Thursday's Child, the book nonetheless has the same epic scope as the first.

Mr. Berry has also published three Kindle Select novellas - 'The Old Soul','Warm Moonlight', and 'Newton in the New Age'. The novellas have the same variety in subject, theme, and voice as the novels. 'The Old Soul' is a cross between science fiction and scientific fiction, with the most unusual protagonist any reader is likely to encounter. It was an Amazon Editor's Choice in the second half of 2012.

'Warm Moonlight' is a story of personal redemption, set in New England circa 1900-1920, and with a soupcon of the supernatural. It has been translated into German and added to the Amazon catalog.

'Newton in the New Age' is a modern domestic comedy. I

Mr. Berry's notes on these pieces can be found at this blog - "http://grealistink.typepad.com/wurtenbaughfiction".

Author Updates

Two years after the publication of 'A Prophet Without Honor', it might be safe to risk a little controversy and discuss the political parable I had in mind in writing the novel.
Back in 2003, during the buildup to the Iraq War, I happened to be reading a collection of pieces of journalism published in the magazine The New Yorker, during the Second World War, extended essays from this city or that. The 'Letter from Paris' and 'Letter from London' written in May of 1940 were

[Spoilers Below]
You can read 'Thursday's Child' without knowing or caring about the mythological basis of the plot. The story is told completely in secular, naturalistic terms. But some readers will find an awareness of the underpinnings of the story add a resonance to the narrative that considerably enhances their enjoyment of the novel. So here goes.
The basic plot arc is that the heroine, Adele Jansen, indulges in what you might call a feminine version of a one nigh

The painting on the cover of Thursday’s Child is a copy of ‘The Crucifiction’, by Jan Van Eck, done about 1440, and on permanent display in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York (Gallery 624). Thursday’s Child is not a supernatural story as such. It’s a sophisticated love story, as much literary fiction as romance, but with a considerable resonance of myth and magic, expressed in indirect, secular terms. One of the central scenes of the book takes place at the Met (as it is affectionately

Wurtenbaugh's account is stunningly original, and he plausibly conjures a remarkably full vision of alternative history. . . [T]his is an impressive work, as bold as it is meticulous.
A masterful exercise in historical hypothesis. - Kirkus Reviews (recommended)
I liked that review, but I didn't like 'alternative history'. I didn't write 'A Prophet Without Honor' to create some alternative fantasy universe. Yo

Several of the posters on the Facebook page about 'A Prophet Without Honor' discuss Neville Chamberlain, and various revisionist historians who attempt to rehabilitate his conduct at Munich. I'm a novelist, not a historian, but I did do my research on the book, and I thought I'd weigh in. In my opinion, Chamberlain's craven, utterly unworthy behavior at Munich did more than anything else except the personality of Hitler himself, to bring about the calamity of World War II. More opinionated te

‘A Prophet Without Honor’ is subtitled ‘A Novel of Alternative History’ because there is no better genre description at present. But the book is actually a novel of what might be called ‘contrafactual history’. ‘Alternative history’ is exemplified by Philip Dick’s ‘Man in the High Castle’ and the Harry Turtledove novels. There are strong elements of science fiction and even fantasy in such books. Rooting the narrative into a probabalistic scenario that could have arisen from actual hist

A Prophet Without Honor It has become a cliche of modern history that the best chance the West had to resist the onslaught of Nazi aggression was in March 1936, when Hitler ordered the reoccupation and remilitarization of the Rhineland in direct violation of two major international treaties. But no such resistance occurred. After the fact, Hitler boasted that the German Army 'would have scurried back to Germany with its tail between its legs' ha

I have been grateful for all the reviews of, and kind words about, the short story 'Warm Moonlight'.
But please note, the narrator is the GREAT-grandmother of the girl to whom she tells the tale. She's in her mid 80's on the day she speaks.

I'd like to tell you a story', an old woman says to her beloved great-granddaughter - and thereby hangs a tale . . . . and what a tale . . .
It's a story of adventure and rescue, redemption and renewal, with just a tinge of spirituality, imbued throughout with a compelling warmth and nostalgia. Written in the great storytelling tradition, 'Warm Moonlight' has all the intensity of a got-to-hear-how-it-ends campfire yarn, but with a decidedly adult sophi

Hello.
If you are reading this, it is likely because you read a story of mine called 'The Old Soul', recently published as a Kindle Single. I actually wrote the story nearly 20 years ago, while I was trying to promote the publication of 'Thursday's Child', the novel described on this blog. The concept goes back even further than that. The notion that recovered memories of past lives, deja vu, and so on might have some actual biological basis occurred to me in my 20's. From tha

In the first months of 1936, Adolf Hitler risked everything by ordering his untrained military to reoccupy the Rhineland. It was a bluff. The Germans would have been forced to retreat if the French or British had offered the slightest opposition. But the bluff succeeded. History changed decisively. Hitler quieted the opposition at home, and marched the world relentlessly on, to the edge of destruction and beyond.

'A Prophet Without Honor' examines that lost chance in detail. The result is a compelling story full of intrigue, danger, romance, and action, culminating in the reckoning that Hitler might have faced, had events taken a different course. It's a hugely entertaining story, written in epistolary style (though journal entries, letters, excerpts from biographies, etc.) with a richly textured sense of time and place.

But, although I have labeled the novel an alternative history, for want of a better word, it is considerably more serious than mere 'what if' speculation. There is no fantasy in the book, no extended account of an alternative universe. Rather, I meant the book to celebrate what Wordsworth famously referred to as 'the little nameless unremembered acts of kindness and of love' - or, in this case, the nameless unremembered acts of honor and of heroism. It is possible that we never know or appreciate the greatest heroes among us, because the acts themselves swallow up the consequences, and the actors are forever lost in the shadows of history. In a profound sense, virtue is indeed its own reward, and in fact the only reward. The significance of those unknown and unknowable acts is the real subject of 'A Prophet Without Honor'.

'The Old Soul', a 6,000 word novella, is an enthralling blend of science fiction and speculative fiction that chronicles the adventures of That-Which-Had-Been, as it traverses the fearsome wilderness of the micro-universe. As tiny and inconspicuous as it may seem, That-Which-Had-Been exhibits an unexpected and varied gift for survival, as it journeys implacably toward its ultimate destination. Along the way, it meets a rich array of ordinary human beings, some of whom assist it along its way, others who impede its progress, none of whom have any idea of its existence.

From whence comes the strange, but universal, experience of deja vu? Why do some people exhibit a wisdom far beyond their age and experience - persons reincarnationists refer to as 'old souls'? Joseph Wurtenbaugh in this short story offers a fascinating and tantalizingly plausible explanation for these phenomena, presented in a natural setting that brims with adventure and exhilarating possibility. Not to be missed by anyone who enjoys science fiction or thinking outside the box.

'I'd like to tell you a story', an old woman says to her beloved great-granddaughter - and thereby hangs a tale . . . . and what a tale . . .

In 'Warm Moonlight', Joseph Wurtenbaugh, the author of 'The Old Soul', presents a supernatural tale done his way. It's a thrilling story of adventure and rescue, of escape and revenge, set in New England in the early days of Prohibition. Written in the great storytelling tradition, 'Warm Moonlight' has all the intensity of a got-to-hear-how-it-ends campfire yarn, but with a decidedly adult sophistication and sensibility.

The ending is unique and satisfying, but leaves the audience, like one of the characters in the story, wondering - how much of it was true? How much invented? Can such things be? Maybe it's a ghost story or . . . . maybe it isn't.

Some people are married to absolutely the right person. Some people are married to absolutely the wrong person. Some people are married to the absolutely right and wrong person at the same time. This fate had befallen Richard, a gentle, scholarly man, hopelessly in love with Annie - a firecracker of a woman, as sexy as she is bright, with whom any man could be completely besotted. The one small - actually, rather largish - fly in the ointment is that Annie's life ambition is to be the best designer of thrill rides on the planet - and Richard is terrified of them.

But when Annie needs some random member of the public to test her newest and greatest device, surely she will call on someone, ANYONE, besides her long-suffering husband. Surely she would not hatch some fiendish scheme to lure him into the role of guinea pig.